One of the best scenes in Vacation is when Chevy Chase's character, Clark Griswold, admonishes the family, "we're all gonna have so much fuckin' fun we'll need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles!" A version of this scene plays out in my hometown of Orlando countless times a day. The two o'clock character parade has just wrapped, mom starts to wrangle the kids as dad checks the map to see whether Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Carribean is closer from their current position just as cries of, "I'm tired of walking" "why do we have to wait in line?" and of course "carry me!" start to rise up. At some point, dad loses it and turning to the family with fires of rage burning in his eyes he declares, "we travelled all the way from Ohio because you wouldn't stop pestering us about how you wanted to see Mickey Mouse! Well now we're here and we spent over a thousand dollars on these Park Hopper passes so we are going to stay here until we get our money's worth! We came here to have fun, so start having fun!!!"
Some of us grew up in Orlando (for better and for worse, believe me) and so our parents would drop us off at Disney, and with season passes in hand, we'd meander around for a few hours, maybe drop some jawbreakers off the Skyway, and wish we lived closer to the beach. Anyway. . .
And so it is with revolution. When we speak of revolution - the real revolution - of course we mean one of the people. Not those other people, of course. We mean people like us. And who knows better what the people really want but us? And I don't even mean the plural "us" so much as the singular "us" - IOW, "me." I mean the me who is reading this right now as well as the me who wrote this earlier. Everyone should have a say, sure, but in the end everyone needs to agree on what is best. Luckily for them, we already know and it is just a matter of showing them how wrong they are.
Can everyone see where this leads yet?
"This revolution was a people's revolution, so you people better start getting with the program!!!"
We all have our ideas about which elements must be included at a minimum to make a revolution the "Real Revolution (TM)". My minimum requirement for a revolution to be real is that it be a revolution where I require myself to work harder to convince myself of others' truths than to convince others of how much righter I am than they are. Not just hearing, not just listening, but making others feel heard is a part of the Real Revolution.
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HEard? Srsly?
ReplyDeleteYou mean the revolution's not going to be a bunch of mostly unguided hipsters running around in their Che Guevara tshirts while they do gopher work for high-falutin' ivory-tower intelleckshuals? Well, dang. Guess I'll cancel my latte order. *headdesk*
Haha, ugh, well I wrote out this kinda long post and just lost it! Here we go again...
ReplyDelete"And who knows better what the people really want but us?"
This is a fundamental organizing difference in communist groups and anarchist groups. Vanguard principles, and not just a historic sense of a buncha old dudes sitting around dictating shit, but in a modern sense as well, directly conflict with the model of prefigurative politics many anarchist groups take on. IMO, modern vanguardist practices manifest themselves in more subtle ways: co-opting groups, having 'front' organiztions or duping folks into your groups, bully\manipulative politics (the type that base their idea on ends justifying means, where you have to do thing here, right now because the rev is tomorrow!), being a self appointed spokesperson for the working class, choosing certain oppresions over others, etc. These all seem to stem from that egotistical 'us means me' you mentioned.